Political issues are increasingly communicated in the electronic media, while newspapers and television have become less frequently used for building and exchanging opinions, especially among young people. Therefore, this chapter examines the expansion of online use and the extent to which there is interest in European and national political developments. It focuses on young people's perceptions of political issues, their involvement in social networking, and the spread of new youth movements around climate change in Germany and in support of the Labour Party in the UK.

The role of the internet

The UK and Germany are among the countries with the highest rate of IT users in the EU: 95 per cent of the British population and 92 per cent of the Germans. Being online is ubiquitous, almost everyone has been using the internet as the most frequent means of communication in the past decade.

Whereas 73 per cent of people over the age of 10 used the internet in 2009, it was 88 per cent in 2019 in Germany (Statistisches Bundesamt, 2020). While all pupils and students, that is teenagers and young adults, were online for many hours a day, only two thirds of pensioners used it at all. Internet activities for private purposes differ by age, too: 89 per cent of the 16 to 24 age group use it for messages on social networks or chat rooms and searching for information on goods and services. The difference between the younger and older generations regarding internet activities is remarkable: whereas among people older than 65 only 19 per cent use the internet for networking, the majority use it for collecting information. This shows the shift in focal interests over the life course.

The 2019 German Youth Study (Albert, Hurrelmann and Quenzel, 2019) summarised the research with this statement: ‘Society is perceived (by youth) online’. Digital channels are preferred over analogue media, while newspapers and TV are rarely used. Almost all Germans aged 10 to 44 use the internet and 14– 29-year-olds are connecting with social media for six hours a day.